On Rocks Lived Under, Covers That Rock, and Tributes

Got Howlin' Wolf's aptly title The Howlin' Wolf Album not too long ago, not knowing a damn thing about Howlin' Wolf (blues isn't my strongest genre). I thank the purchase in part to a sort of recognition of the album—which the Black Keys most obviously payed tribute to with their album Brothers—and in part because the girlfriend likes to push my tastes sometimes.

Eddie Murphy - How Could It Be

My dad and my uncle pretty much spent the 80s making references to Eddie Murphy's stand-up powerhouse Delirious. Of course I didn't get any of it, I was 8 by the time the 80s were over.

Then one day late in high school I was at a friend's house watching Delirious and suddenly I realized I knew all the jokes that were coming up, even though I'd never seen the film. My entire childhood unlocked in front of me, and I finally understood exactly how much adults thrilled to make dirty jokes that their children wouldn't get. It was a revelation.

If you've seen Delirious, you know the part where Murphy goes into his Michael Jackson impression. Aside from some choice comedic moments, Murphy briefly shows off his pipes, and it's damn impressive:

Scattergarden

Soundgarden, they've hit quite the renaissance lately, haven't they?

I find it fairly important to take this band as a whole, because the whole is much stranger and richer than what most people think of when they think Soundgarden, since most only think of the post-Badmotorfinger era.

Because of my convoluted listening routine, I have ended up listening both the Screaming Life/Fopp and Badmotorfinger today. I don't have much to say about the latter at the moment, other than the fact that I'll probably never get sick of playing it, so let's focus on Screaming Life instead, since this is probably the one out of the band's catalog that I am least familiar with.

Tool - Opiate

It's been a long time since I could honestly say I've had a favorite band. The older I get the more I qualify all my opinions with some sort of academic nonsense. Blame my liberal arts education. I know I do every day.

Sure, there's bands I listen to significantly more than others, and based on play count my Last.fm profile will tell you who my favorite bands are, but even that list comes with a serious caveat: the majority of those plays came while I was still working as a cook. For the sake of not wanting to piss my coworkers off with some of my more whimsical tastes, I instead played a great deal of much "safer" music. So although those stats are interesting, they're really only part of the picture.

Scattershot

Sitting here listening to the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, an album that generally gets a shrug from most Beatles fans. Even I'd agree that the record is less than the sum of its parts: considering how many very memorable Beatles tunes and singles are on here, it's strange that the record doesn't really get me going the way so many of their others do.

Lost among the many renowned singles are "Flying" and "Blue Jay Way," two of the moodiest tunes on the record, but tunes that actually help to give the record some good depth. By all accounts, this record was Paul at his most controlling, and in fact he apparently even mapped out the album on some sort of wheel, doling out songs like assignments to George and John.

Decemberists - Always the Bridesmaid

On to the Decemberists' Always the Bridesmaid singles series. In every relationship, a couple ends up with "their" band, and I can trace the Decemberists becoming "our" band with my girlfriend and I back to this singles series, as right around these releases we had a chance to see the band perform at the Moore Theater in Seattle, where much hilarity ensued.

The Offspring - Americana

Ah, the Offspring's Americana. I'm strangely excited to be listening to this record right now, perhaps if nothing else because it's been years since I've done so. This is album is my junior year of high school. Not exclusively, but a lot of images of giant trampolines or riding shotgun in my friend's Bronco surface almost immediately with this one.

I'll still never be able to forgive "Pretty Fly" for the egregious radio ear raping, but this overall this record is surprisingly intelligent and focused. Yes, you can accuse "Why Don't You Get a Job?" of ripping off "Obla-Di-Obla-Da," but that's the point. The album is called Americana, for god's sakes. The intention of the record is to reference as much pop culture as it can. I can sympathize with this.

The Rolling Stones - Emotional Rescue

The challenge of listening to older music, especially music released before we were born (this one beats me by two years), is that we have a natural tendency to filter it through the prism of "now." We know all that's come afterwards, and we know how the group has weathered the passing of time.

In fact, we often know this supplementary information before we know any of the music. Here I am listening to the Rolling Stones' 1980 album Emotional Rescue, and despite my best efforts I can't help but listen to the Stones through the prism of the silly old men they have become.

This already isn't the way I expected to start

It's Saturday, and I was hoping not to have to work today, but the girlfriend was a bit greedy for some me time yesterday, and I was happy to oblige her. But here I am on a Saturday, enjoying the weather from out the window and watching ninja squirrels raid bird feeders.

So here goes though, time to start word dumping on whatever I happen to be listening to.

Incubus - If Not Know, When?

Not especially pleased to start the inaugural post with an album that I'm not especially pleased with, but hey.

Incubus to me is proof positive of how long a band can endure if they anchor themselves to a couple memories. How can I listen to this band without thinking of high school and my first visit to my future college, where the last thing I remember is talking about how important "The Warmth" was to my burgeoning music life before coming to face-first in a toilet a few hours later.

The band is bound to this moment in my life, and I've casually followed them since, never being particularly excited about them, but never particularly disliking them either.

Hello.

Time to start an experiment. I'm going to talk about music here. That in and of itself is not new or novel in any way, but it's a change from the more scattershot blogging I have been doing.

I don't have too many definite rules for this space, other than the fact that every post will have something to do with music. The idea for the site came during a particularly busy work week. I work from home, and during that time I listen to a lot of records.

I've always played little listening games with my collection—listening in alphabetical order, chronological order, etc.—and I began a particularly fun listening regimen about a month or so ago.

I get excited about this stuff while I'm listening to it, and too many errant thoughts are going to waste in my head. I imagine this space will become a place for reviews, narratives, commentary, and shameless self promotion.

I'm thinking I might live blog during my work day. Posting comments about the records I'm listening to as they strike me, kinda like what I did when I listened to Weezer's whole catalog a few months ago. I dunno. We'll see.

My taste in music is kinda strange, a really quirky subset of mainstream rock and awful nonsense. You just wait and see.